Thu, 09 Aug 2012

I have an old tool bag I bought at a surplus store a zillion years ago
to carry tools in the trunk of my Fiat X1/9, while I was
learning
to work on cars. It's reasonably compact, with two pockets, which
I designated as "wrenches" and "everything else", and it carried nearly
all my tools for over a decade.

But over that time, it's been getting progressively shabbier and
dirtier -- funny thing about something that gets tossed on roadsides
and parking lots. And I've been getting tired of the way, when I need
to find that 10mm wrench, I have to dump everything in the "wrenches"
pocket out on the garage floor and sort through them. Then the last
straw was the zipper breaking.

Lately, every time I have to find a tool, an idle thought flits through
the back of my mind, like ... wouldn't it be nice if I had some flat
thing that held all the tools in some sort of order, which then rolled
up into a compact bag?

It took an embarrassingly long time before it occurred to me that
if I was thinking this,
maybe someone else had had the same idea ... and to go to Amazon and
search for "tool roll". And discover that there were dozens of these
things, and they're not even expensive. Under $20 for a nice one.
So I ordered one.

When it arrived, I took all my tools out of the old bag, washed and
dried them, and sorted them. (What ever happened to my 14mm socket?
Or the short 3/8-inch extension?) Then I laid out the tool roll
and started choosing pockets.

I was glad I'd chosen the 25-pocket model instead of one of the
smaller ones. I didn't have any problem filling out the pockets,
and I'm still not sure what to do with my set of deep sockets.
Maybe I should get an even bigger roll!

But I'm very happy with my tool roll for now.
I'm jazzed about how organized the tools are now and how easy it'll
be to find things, and to pack up after a repair job. And it rolls up
much smaller than the old tool bag, so it'll be easy to store in the
Miata's trunk. Not that I expect to need to carry tools with the Miata,
like I sometimes needed for the Fiats ... but it never hurts to be
prepared. And having my tools in one compact place will also it easy
to toss them in the back of the Rav4 when we go on desert trips.

(And no, I don't know how the large Vice-Grips got so rusty. They
never got wet.)